Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

52/440 (page 36)

detect any excretion of albumen in any part, and especially in the capsules of tlie boiled kidney or after hardening by alcohol. This may be very easily and securely effected in rabbits, by rapidly beating tbem (see page 48), or by injecting a very small quantity of phospliorised oil —^ cctm. of a solution of one pai-t pbospborus to eighty olive oil) under the skin (see S. IV). Often immediately after a single injection, but always after a repetition on the second or third day there is evident albuminuria, the urine contains finely granular casts and occasionally renal epithelium easily recognisable. After boiling the kidneys and hardening them in alcohol, they exhibit changes corresponding with the degree in which they have suiiered. These are sometimes of a transient character and take the form of patches of hyperaamia, minute haemorrhages, swelling of the epithelium, and perhaps coagulated albumen in the capsules alone or in the urinary tubules as well, or there may be nothing remarkable, no albuminous coagula or none at least in the capsules. The same description holds good of albuminuria occurring after rapid heating, and also' of the same symptom resulting from the injection of egg- albumen into the blood. Miss Bridges Adams (42), in a- series of experiments under Cohnheim and Weigert's direction, noticed albuminuria as a constant phenomenon in six cases in which the injection was made, and in all of them without exception the boiling method failed to detect any albuminous secretion in the capsules. And yet albumen has certainly been present in the capsules, for, as Ribbert has shown, it really escapes from the glomerular vessels and from them alone under those circumstances, and may be seen in the- capsules after coagulation. But that it must necessarily be visible under all circumstances is untrue, as the above-men- tioned experiments strikingly show, and as might a priurv have been expected. For in the normal condition the glome- rular tuft completely fills the capsule, and is in such close contact with it that even with a magnifying power of 800 diameters applied to very fine sections of a pig's kidney re- moved during life, and placed in a freezing mixture, we are able- to distinguish only a scarcely measurable cup-shapod fissure- between the capsular and the glomerular epithelium.^ This. > 8. W. Krause, ' Allg. u. mikrosk. Anat./ 187^, S. 246.